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Infor ERP Tips & News from the Experts

Infor LX | Infor LN | BPCS | Baan | Infor M3

Kathy Barthelt
/ Categories: Infor LN & Baan Tips

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Top 10 Survival Tips For Manufacturers

by Guy Morgan / IndustryWeek

Under intense cost pressures, quality is at risk at many manufacturers. These 10 tips can help you survive the competitive challenges ahead.

  1. Maintain your focus. Make a decision about the kind of company you are and stick with it. 
  2. Reinvent your products regularly. Suppliers who sharply differentiate their products fare the best. 
  3. Maximize your productivity and increase your speed through enhanced product and process design. Lean manufacturing focuses on production and its associated costs from a component's conception.
  4. Pay attention to your supply chain. You must know about any risks, financial or otherwise, that threaten your suppliers. 
  5. Offshoring vs Onshoring. You must know the total cost of products. 
  6. Improve quality. There are still too many manufacturers delivering components with high defect rates. 
  7. Diversify your customer base. This may involve segmenting your industry or going outside it.
  8. Embrace globalization. Acquisitions, consolidations and diversification can help suppliers achieve economies of scale. 
  9. Invest in your employees. Suppliers who paid higher wages and made bigger investments in training and equipment came through the downturn better than those who didn't.
  10. Facilitate total productive maintenance. While this concept has been around for decades, some manufacturers are still not training machine operators to perform many of the day-to-day tasks of simple maintenance and fault-finding.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

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Kathy Barthelt

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

If you setup the “From” and “To” Location fields in the Work Center file, this will determine the locations for material issue transactions and production reporting transactions.

The reporting of the transactions happen through production reporting, JIT600, or using the Shop Floor labor posting, SFC600, or Shop Floor Posting from SFC650.

Remember, any location used in the work center file must first be set up in the location master file. Using an MES solution by-passes the need to key any of the data to Infor LX.

Ok… so you want to know the status of a specific shop order that was released two days ago.

What do you do?

It’s a sure bet that you have a manager, supervisor, or planner who can walk the floor and find the order at whatever work center it happens to be at. He/she can then answer “what operations have been completed and how many were completed?” All this requires leg work, and of course, a fair amount of time.

Now, if you have set up your BPCS master files properly, and you report transaction activity, you should be able to get those shop order statuses much faster using the SFC300 Shop Order Inquiry Screen.

At your fingertips you can see:

  • Release date & due date
  • How many hours remain in total and at each operation
  • The quantity required, what was finished, and the remaining quantity
  • What components (materials) have been issued

Pretty basic information, right? Are you getting what you need to know? If not, then you may want to reexamine how your BPCS files are set up and what transactions along with their frequency are captured.

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Tips: LN | Baan

Users can personalize sessions and apply special formatting to the data displayed in sessions. The personalizations and formatting settings that are specified by the users are stored on the LN server. Administrators can maintain these settings.

  • Session personalizations

    Users can personalize sessions in various ways. users can, for example, hide fields, change labels, customize the toolbar, and move fields to another tab. Administrators can maintain the personalizations defined by the users. For example, an administrator can export personalizations to an XML file, import personalizations from an XML file, and copy personalizations to another user, to a DEM role, or to a company number.

  • Report personalizations

    You can use the Report Designer (ttstppersrep) to personalize the layouts and style of reports, without modifying the standard reports or using an external reporting solution. The changes are stored as personalizations.

    You can also generate new reports that are based on a selection of fields from the application data model. These reports are generated in the extensibility package. You can personalize these reports in the Report Designer (ttstppersrep), or modify them in Infor LN Studio.

    For details, see the Infor LN Report Designer Development Guide
     
  • Conditional formatting

    users can define conditions to apply special formatting to the data displayed in LN sessions. The users can define multiple conditions per session and different types of formatting, such as a specific color for particular fields or rows, and a warning symbol for particular rows. Administrators can maintain the formatting settings specified by the users and can define system-wide formatting settings.

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